Cytox Expands Collaboration with AIBL to Identify Those Most at Risk to Rapidly Progress to Alzheimer’s

24.9.2018 05:00:00 | Business Wire

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Cytox,
a precision medicine company which today is commercializing polygenic
risk scoring (PRS) approaches for assessing genetic risk for developing
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other neurological diseases, has announced
it has expanded its research collaboration with the Australian
Imaging, Biomarker & Lifestyle Flagship Study of Ageing (AIBL)
to test new algorithms for identifying the pre-symptomatic and mild
cognitively impaired people most at risk to progress to AD.

Under the expanded agreement Cytox will assess genetic risk for
accelerated development of AD using its current, commercially available,
research use only approaches developed to run on the Thermo Fisher
Scientific Applied Biosystems™ GeneTitan™ Multi-Channel (MC) instrument
platform. AIBL will provide biobank samples together with associated
longitudinal data from study research participants clinically diagnosed
as cognitively normal, with mild cognitive impairment or with AD. Each
subject has confirmed amyloid status from PET imaging, with some of the
subjects remaining cognitively stable and others cognitively declining
during the study period.

Genotyping of DNA samples will be performed by Cytox’s validated
Australian genotyping services partner, Ramaciotti
Centre for Genomics, a national infrastructure facility delivering
internationally competitive genomic services and based in Sydney,
Australia.

“The AIBL biobank presents a tremendous research opportunity due to the
number of blood samples from subjects which are extremely well
characterized both in terms of cognitive performance and biomarker
status over a significant period of time,” states Dr. Richard Pither,
CEO of Cytox. “By working closely with AIBL and its researchers, led by
AIBL genetic lead, Dr. Simon Laws, we will explore the performance of
our PRS approaches for assessing genetic risk for progressing from
initial symptoms to fully symptomatic AD.

“Through this collaborative work we foresee the data generated will help
drug developers running clinical trials and sponsors of large cohort
studies better stratify their subjects based on accelerated disease
development risk. Over time, and as new treatments for AD make it to
market, we plan to make the products and services that result from this
collaboration available for routine clinical practice.”